Sovereign wealth funds want Perplexity’s AI on their own hardware, with no data access for Perplexity
Perplexity is fielding requests for fully isolated deployments of its Computer agent platform as data sovereignty becomes a buying condition
Some of the world’s most cautious investors have a request for Perplexity: bring your AI to our servers, and do not look inside.
Sovereign wealth funds have asked Perplexity to run its product on hardware the funds own. That arrangement gives them full control and blocks Perplexity from seeing their data.
What the funds are asking for
The request centers on Perplexity Computer, the company’s agent platform. The funds want the whole system running on their own machines, powered by fine-tuned open-weight models.
Open-weight models are AI systems whose underlying parameters are published. Anyone with enough hardware can download and run them without calling home to the original developer.
Under this setup, Perplexity has no access to the data. It also gets no usage telemetry, which is the behind-the-scenes reporting that tells a software company how its product is being used.
CEO Aravind Srinivas described the requirements in an interview on Octo...